Chinese Whispers

Below is my attempt at decoding/interpreting Sam’s graphic score. For the group task in which we had to come up with a score to follow and then perform, my group decided on incorporating ‘Chinese Whispers’ into the process. Essentially the idea was for one person to draw a fairly complex score (this was Sam) , then each group member simplified it one after the other, there was no discussion during this process–this was important because we wanted each person to re-interpret the score naturally. The score below was intend to be read from left to write (landscape), clearly inspired by Cornelius Cardew I wanted to keep the original structure of Sams score but make it more minimal and bold, emphasising certain points and diminishing others.

Eventually by the final group member, the score had been reduced to a mere few lines and blobs. Each member than took a different score to use in our performance. We hoped that by doing this one person would essentially be leading the group (the person with the most complete score) and the other scores would result in strange improvised diversions away from the main sound.

Truthfully the end result was rather chaotic but the moments in which we listened and respected each others space worked well. I think the gaps in most of the scores forced blind improvising. It would be interesting to expand on this idea by using a score which is destroyed after a number of minutes and then the group has to reconstruct it? Or instead they perform attempting to remember the destroyed score?